Why we’re excited about Google Zero Touch provisioning

Recently Google announced support for Zero Touch Provisioning. The announcement understandably generated quite a bit of excitement throughout the industry and especially among MobileIron customers. We’ve always felt that, although we’ve made leaps and bounds over the years in simplifying the Android enrollment process, there has always been “room for improvement.” Zero Touch Provisioning is the hallmark of a new era in Android device security, since it makes enrollment into an EMM simple and intuitive.

How it works

With Google’s new “ZTP” feature, when devices are purchased by an organization through an approved reseller, IMEI’s or serial numbers are transmitted to the Android Zero Touch Portal. An approved admin can then assign a configuration to the device, for instance, directing a device to enroll with a pre-populated username to MobileIron Cloud or Core. An Over-The-Air enrollment will occur on brand new devices or after a device has been reset to factory defaults. Admins can also decide whether Google’s system apps will appear on a device and streamline the onboarding process by reducing the number of steps needed to enroll a device.

Devices that register with ZTP become fully managed and owned by the organization, which means that admins have greater control over the devices and heightened capabilities like the option to deploy apps silently or create kiosks on the device.

Today, Zero Touch Enrollment is supported on Google Pixel and Pixel 2 devices running Android 7.0 or newer. We’re also beginning to see resellers and OEM partners announce support for the new standard for 8.0 devices, with Huawei recently announcing support for the Mate 10 and Sony for the Xperia XZ1 and XZ1 Compact. Not all Android 8.0 devices support Zero Touch, so be sure to check with the manufacturer or with Google to see if they will be supporting this important new capability.

For the latest list of approved resellers and devices and instructions on how to participate in Zero Touch Provisioning, please be sure to check out these links from Google:

Want to learn more?

MobileIron customers can take advantage of materials published to our Community portal and check out a video overview in our Zero Touch Provisioning Guide.

We’d also recommend checking out this article from bayton.org which includes a video demonstrating Zero Touch enrollment of a Sony device on MobileIron Core. Zero Touch provisioning is supported today on both MobileIron Cloud and Core.